All UK specific - In addition to the hardware cost, which was extremely high (and being in the UK meant it was substantially higher than the US), but software

All UK specific - In addition to the hardware cost, which was extremely high (and being in the UK meant it was substantially higher than the US), but software costs were high too. Before cheap subscription software, which is so bemoaned nowadays, all the software packages were 10x the cost, and still required repurchasing every year or two. Technically your older copy of Office, Photoshop, etc would still work fine, but you couldn't share documents with people with newer versions, as anything they saved you couldn't open. Those packages were hundreds of pounds each. Piracy was the only way as a teen to be able to actually get any software, I couldn't afford anything, even if I wanted to pay for it. A decent image editor can be had for $5 a month from the App Store now. Office is $10 for the whole family, and includes more storage than every drive I owned for the first 15 years I owned computers. Even OS upgrades were all expensive. Even up until the early MacOS X versions it cost $129 a year for each version. Dropping it to $29 was a big deal for Snow Leopard, which was 2009. And back in the late 90s/early 2000s download speeds were so bad that it was easier to pay for linux CDs too. I paid for the big boxed copies of SuSE 6.4 and 7, for example, just to get a good CD with all the packages on it. Somewhere in that period I also remember when dial-up internet providers started to convert to providing free-phone 0800 (800 numbers in the US), if you paid for an account, and convincing my parents to pay for it, so that we wouldn't be billed by the minute any more. Before that a lot of providers just had toll numbers, so there was no monthly bill, we paid through the phone-line. Finally I got ADSL in college, and at 8Mbps it was the fastest available in the UK from a tiny, niche ISP, which was effectively a pyramid scheme trying to get enough business through very under-cost, but high speed internet. They went bust after a couple of years, but it was amazing to move from dial-up to >1Mbps speeds.